Public-Facing Essays

Hats Off for the History of Science

In September 2021, the Metropolitan Museum of Art announced that they had uncovered an earlier draft of Jacques-Louis David’s portrait of Antoine-Laurent and Marie-Anne Pierrette Paulze Lavoisier. They argue that the first draft — in which the Lavoisiers sport flashy clothes, without the scientific instruments so prominently displayed in the 1788 version — represents a shift in the Lavoisiers’ identity, from fashionable tax farmers to serious scientists. I advance a different interpretation: the Lavoisiers’ identities were always multi-faceted, and the changes to the portrait underscore how categories of science, fashion, wealth, and utility overlapped at the end of the Old Regime.

Enlightenment Wife Guys

The existence of “wife guys”—men prone to a constant display of heterosexual marital bliss—might well seem like a modern phenomenon, one that only blossomed thanks to photography and then went supernova with the advent of the internet. But while wife guys certainly thrive in our era of Facebook, their history stretches deep into the past. To really understand why so many men are eager to play this part, we have to go back to the beginning and see how ambitious men took advantage of new media to showcase their seemingly flawless domestic lives—all for their own benefit.

Three’s A Crowd?

One of the great loves of Denis Diderot’s life was his mistress Sophie Volland. Theirs was a love that brought him the “sweetest, purest joy that a man could possibly feel.” Because they were apart for much of their affair (Diderot was married, and Volland’s mother kept them apart), they produced a voluminous and revealing correspondence. Sophie’s letters are, regrettably, lost, but what remains of Diderot’s correspondence provides an astonishing glimpse into the life of one of the Enlightenment’s most famous philosophers. The letters reveal that Volland may have had an incestuous, same-sex relationship with her sister and underscore how fluid hetero- and homosexual affections could be in eighteenth-century France.